Merger Simulation: A Simplified Approach with New Applications

Merger simulation is growing in importance as a tool to evaluate the unilateral competitive effects of mergers. This paper offers a relatively non-technical description of the principles of merger simulation. In addition, it introduces PCAIDS, a new and highly flexible "calibrated-demand" merger simulation methodology that is based on a simplified version of AIDS. PCAIDS can be implemented using market shares and two price elasticities; scanner or transaction-level data are not required. The paper offers some applications of merger simulation with PCAIDS that include comparisons with other simulation models. It also shows how PCAIDS can be applied to the analysis of efficiencies, divestiture, and product repositioning/entry. Finally, the paper offers an analysis of the Merger Guidelines safeharbors. A detailed mathematical appendix is included.

“Drive-by” Jurisdiction: Congressional Oversight in Court

On July 9, 2020, in Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP and Trump v. Deutsche Bank AG, the Supreme Court held that the lower courts did not adequately consider the separation of powers concerns attendant to congressional subpoenas for presidential information. Given that the question presented in Mazars concerned whether Congress had a legitimate legislative purpose in subpoenaing the President’s personal records, the Supreme Court’s decision is anything but a model of clarity. The Court simultaneously opined that disputes “involving nonprivileged, private information” “do[ ] not implicate sensitive Executive Branch deliberations” while claiming “congressional subpoenas for the President’s information unavoidably pit the political branches against one another.” This essay presents a more precise framework for adjudicating interbranch disputes. By understanding Congress as it understands itself, this article draws a legal distinction between congressional investigations of the private sphere versus oversight of the Executive Branch. It analogizes Congress’s regulatory investigations to the sorts of quasi-judicial, quasi-legislative regulatory inquiries commonplace among federal agencies. Like regulatory inquiries by federal agencies, subpoenas for testimony and documents are enforceable against the private sphere. Oversight subpoenas, it is argued, are not enforceable precisely because oversight involves political questions inappropriate for judicial resolution. Just like in the administrative context, where regulatory inquiries must be purged of evidence of political taint, any regulatory inquiry from Congress must be likewise detached from its more politicized counterpart in the name of oversight. In this sense, the accommodation hinted in Chief Justice Roberts’ Mazars opinion can be properly understood as a requirement that Congress exhaust its political remedies before seeking private ones. As such, the analytic framework presented here makes the otherwise hard case of Mazars an easy case of identifying an improper attempt to conduct oversight in the facade of a regulatory inquiry, one tainted by prior political efforts and a prematurely clotured political process

Industrial Jurisdiction

William Novak’s New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State reveals how the current administrative state evolved to control economic activity through an incremental rejection of state-based common law and police powers in favor of centralized public regulation. This review identifies the business case for the administrative state and presents the first academic treatment of pro-regulation testimony from business interests during congressional consideration of the Interstate Commerce Act. In so doing, this review shows how the concept of industry is as much a legal concept as it is an economic one. This review argues that the nature of regulatory jurisdiction being tied to the concept of industry has implications for current regulatory entrepreneurship scholarship, which examines the ways regulation can be both a barrier as well as a subsidy to business. By explicating the legal significance of industrial jurisdiction, this review identifies the significance of industry and jurisdiction as typologies of interest in the study and adjudication of administrative law

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThe research detailed within this dissertation investigates the neurobiological changes associated with emotional processing of backward masked emotional faces in veterans with and without posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD affects millions of Americans, including approximately 20% of veterans, and is associated with a number of negative symptoms, including hyperarousal, avoidance, and flashbacks. In this dissertation, we examined a group of 15 veterans with PTSD and a group of 12 veterans without PTSD using both functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). Using fMRI, the blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal of the amygdala and extrastriate cortex was measured, and using EEG, the P1 event-related potential (ERP) was recorded in response to masked affect. The veteran group with PTSD exhibited increased extrastriate BOLD signal but decreased P1 ERP amplitude in the right hemisphere. This was evidence of a right hemisphere specific visuosensory modulation in veterans with PTSD, which is most evident using EEG. Unexpectedly, the P1 ERP and extrastriate BOLD signal did not display a significant linear relationship in either veteran group, which indicates that although activity was measured from similar regions, the two methodologies provided distinct information regarding neuronal activity in this study. In addition, a relationship was observed between the BOLD signal of the amygdala and extrastriate cortex and the degree of combat exposure, based on the Combat Exposure Scale (CES). A veteran group without PTSD displayed a negative correlation between the extent of combat exposure and amygdalar BOLD activity. This was not the case for a veteran group with PTSD, who instead exhibited a negative correlation between the degree of combat exposure and extrastriate BOLD activity. When the total score of the CES was used as a covariate, the veteran group with PTSD displayed significantly increased amygdalar BOLD and extrastriate BOLD activity, compared to the veteran group without PTSD. This research highlights the importance of multimodal research, as differences between the two groups were observed using both methodologies. Our results suggest a relationship between the degree of combat exposure and the processing of masked emotional stimuli, even in veterans without PTSD

Magnetic resonance imaging of myocardial strain after acute ST-segment-elevation myocardial infarction: a systematic review

The purpose of this systematic review is to provide a clinically relevant, disease-based perspective on myocardial strain imaging in patients with acute myocardial infarction or stable ischemic heart disease. Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging uniquely integrates myocardial function with pathology. Therefore, this review focuses on strain imaging with cardiac magnetic resonance. We have specifically considered the relationships between left ventricular (LV) strain, infarct pathologies, and their associations with prognosis. A comprehensive literature review was conducted in accordance with the PRISMA guidelines. Publications were identified that (1) described the relationship between strain and infarct pathologies, (2) assessed the relationship between strain and subsequent LV outcomes, and (3) assessed the relationship between strain and health outcomes. In patients with acute myocardial infarction, circumferential strain predicts the recovery of LV systolic function in the longer term. The prognostic value of longitudinal strain is less certain. Strain differentiates between infarcted versus noninfarcted myocardium, even in patients with stable ischemic heart disease with preserved LV ejection fraction. Strain recovery is impaired in infarcted segments with intramyocardial hemorrhage or microvascular obstruction. There are practical limitations to measuring strain with cardiac magnetic resonance in the acute setting, and knowledge gaps, including the lack of data showing incremental value in clinical practice. Critically, studies of cardiac magnetic resonance strain imaging in patients with ischemic heart disease have been limited by sample size and design. Strain imaging has potential as a tool to assess for early or subclinical changes in LV function, and strain is now being included as a surrogate measure of outcome in therapeutic trials

This Watchface Fits with my Tattoos:Investigating Customisation Needs and Preferences in Personal Tracking

People engage in self-tracking with diverse data collection and visualisation needs and preferences. Customisable self-tracking tools offer the potential to support individualized preferences by letting people make changes to the aesthetics and functionality of tracker displays. In this paper, we use the customisation options offered by the displays of commercial fitness smartwatches as a lens to investigate when, why and how 386 self-trackers engage in customisations in their daily lives. We find that people largely customise their trackers' display frequently, multiple times a day, or not at all, with frequent customisations reflecting situational data, aesthetic and personal meaning needs. We discuss implications for the design of tracking tools aiming to support customisation and discuss the utility of customisations towards goal scaffolding and maintaining interest in tracking

Digging Deeper into Hardin\u27s Pasture: The Complex Institutional Structure of The Tragedy of the Commons

The institutional and ecological structure of Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” appears deceptively simple: the open-access pasture eventually will be overexploited and degraded unless (i) it is privatized, (ii) the government regulates access and use, or (iii) the users themselves impose a common-property regime to regulate their own access and use. In this paper, we argue that the institutional structure of the “Herder Problem” (as it is known to game theorists) is far more complicated than it is usually portrayed. Specifically, it is not just about the pasture. It is equally about the grass that grows on the pasture and the cattle that consume the grass. Even Elinor Ostrom — a scholar known for embracing complexity — presented an overly simplistic portrayal of Hardin’s open-access pasture when she described its governance system as a null set of institutions. A more careful assessment of the situation, employing Ostrom’s Social-Ecological System (SES) framework, broadens the focus from the res communes omnium pasture to incorporate the res nullius grass that grows upon it and the res private cattle grazing there. The “tragedy” arises from the combination and interactions of the resources and their governing institutions, not just from the absence of property in the pasture. If the grass was not subject to appropriation, the cattle were not privately owned, or if property- and contract-enforcement institutions supporting market exchange were absent, the “tragedy of the commons” probably would not arise regardless of the pasture’s open-access status